Joyce Haber, a Gossip Columnist Known for Barbed Commentaries

By BRUCE LAMBERT

Published: August 1, 1993

Joyce Haber, known for her barbed commentaries as one of the last of Hollywood's powerful gossip columnists and the author of a best-selling book on the movie industry, died on Thursday at a hospital in Los Angeles. Her age was variously given as 60 or 62.

The cause was kidney and liver failure, said a spokesman for the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Miss Haber and her syndicated column played a role in a sensational case in the 1970's that involved the actress Jean Seberg, who suffered a premature labor and later committed suicide.

In 1968, The Los Angeles Times named Miss Haber as a successor to Hedda Hopper, who had died in 1966. Louella Parsons, a rival Hollywood columnist for the Hearst papers, had retired in 1965.

Miss Haber once described Melina Mercouri as having "wall-to-wall hips, an ear-to-ear smile and more teeth than a pretzel has salt." She said Julie Andrews had "a kind of flowering dullness about her."

Miss Haber retired as a columnist to write "The Users" (Delacorte, 1976), a best-selling novel. Its passages on the exploits of 70 real and fictional Hollywood characters disturbed even some of her friends and sources. Role in Seberg Case

The Seberg episode started in 1970 when Miss Haber wrote about "the baby Miss A is expecting and its father." The column said: "Papa's said to be a rather prominent Black Panther."

Three months later, Newsweek named Miss Seberg, a white actress, as the expectant mother. The day after reading that, she went into premature labor. The baby girl died three days later. Miss Seberg and her husband, Romain Gary, a French novelist and former diplomat, sued Newsweek and settled for several thousand dollars.

It was later disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had plotted to plant the rumor in a campaign to discredit and harass radicals, whom Miss Seberg had supported. But the agency's files said that J. Edgar Hoover had temporarily delayed the plan when the Haber column item mysteriously appeared.

Mr. Gary said Miss Seberg became despondent and tried to commit suicide on the anniversaries of the baby's death. Eventually she killed herself in 1979. Mr. Gary, who blamed the F.B.I. for her troubles, committed suicide in 1980, although the reason was unclear.

Miss Haber said that her report was based on a letter given to her by an editor, whom she did not name, and that she had not been aware of any F.B.I. involvement.

Miss Haber was a child of the movie industry. As a six-year-old, she acted in three "Our Gang" features. She was educated at Brearley School, Bryn Mawr College and Barnard.

After working briefly in summer stock theater, as a political campaign aide and at an advertising agency, she joined Time magazine as a researcher.

She was divorced from Douglas S. Cramer Jr., a television and film producer.

Her survivors include a son, Douglas 3d, and a daughter, Courtney Cramer.